None of which makes sense without the context of what a enormous jackass Buckley had famously been in online spaces for YEARS. It’s not just that loss was a weirdly serious addition to a silly comic, it’s that it perfectly encapsulated the kind of sanctimonious self-important attitude Buckley espoused and instantly turned his shitty online persona into a joke.
I don’t know if it is genuinely possible to still appreciate loss the way it was without all of the enormity of that context.
I see your point and don’t entirely disagree, I’ll just its hard to feel bad about somebody suffering the consequences of their own actions (not the miscarriage obviously, but the reaction to it).
You don’t really get to complain about feeling alone when you’re the one that burned all the bridges that lead to your house, imo.
Man, at this point some sociology student could probably write a dissertation just on the cultural context of this comic alone. Both the stuff you’re talking about regarding de-stigmatizing talking about trauma (and miscarriage in particular), and the way the comic itself has been meme-ified and distilled down to representations as abstract as “.:|:;”
I think Cyanide and Happiness did a good job encapsulating your point and why everyone clowned on it at the time.
